#Epistemology of Social Media

[omegaphilosophia]

The Philosophy of Social Media

The philosophy of social media examines the profound impact of social media platforms on human interaction, identity, and society. This interdisciplinary field intersects with ethics, epistemology, sociology, and media studies, exploring how digital technologies shape our communication, perceptions, and behaviors. By analyzing the philosophical implications of social media, we gain insights into the nature of digital life and its influence on contemporary society.

Key Themes in the Philosophy of Social Media

Digital Identity and Self-Presentation:

Social media allows users to construct and curate their online personas, raising questions about authenticity, self-expression, and the nature of identity.

Philosophers explore how the digital environment influences self-perception and the distinction between online and offline selves.

Epistemology and Information:

The spread of information and misinformation on social media platforms presents challenges to traditional epistemology.

Discussions focus on the credibility of sources, the role of algorithms in shaping information, and the impact of echo chambers on knowledge and belief formation.

Ethics of Communication and Behavior:

The ethical implications of online behavior, including issues of privacy, cyberbullying, and digital harassment, are central to this field.

Philosophers examine the moral responsibilities of individuals and platforms in fostering respectful and ethical online interactions.

Social Media and Society:

Social media's role in shaping public discourse, political engagement, and social movements is a significant area of inquiry.

The influence of social media on democracy, public opinion, and collective action is critically analyzed.

Privacy and Surveillance:

The balance between privacy and surveillance on social media platforms raises important ethical and philosophical questions.

The implications of data collection, user tracking, and digital surveillance on personal freedom and autonomy are explored.

The Nature of Virtual Communities:

Social media creates new forms of community and social interaction, prompting philosophical inquiries into the nature and value of virtual communities.

The concepts of digital solidarity, community building, and the social dynamics of online interactions are examined.

Aesthetics of Social Media:

The visual and aesthetic dimensions of social media, including the impact of images, videos, and memes, are considered.

Philosophers analyze how aesthetic choices and digital art forms influence perception and communication in the digital age.

Addiction and Mental Health:

The psychological effects of social media use, including addiction, anxiety, and the impact on mental health, are significant areas of study.

Philosophers explore the ethical considerations of designing platforms that may contribute to addictive behaviors.

Algorithmic Bias and Justice:

The role of algorithms in shaping social media experiences raises questions about bias, fairness, and justice.

Philosophers critically assess the implications of algorithmic decision-making and its impact on social equality and discrimination.

Commercialization and Consumerism:

The commercialization of social media platforms and the commodification of user data are key concerns.

Discussions focus on the ethical implications of targeted advertising, consumer manipulation, and the economic dynamics of social media companies.

The philosophy of social media provides a comprehensive framework for understanding the complexities of digital interaction and its impact on contemporary life. By examining issues of identity, epistemology, ethics, and societal influence, this field offers valuable insights into the ways social media shapes our world. It encourages a critical and reflective approach to digital life, emphasizing the need for ethical considerations and responsible use of technology.

[harmonic-psyche]

That's true, and I'm glad you pointed it out. It is way too common and way too easy to accuse a vaguely defined group of hypocrisy when, in reality, the group just includes people who disagree with each other.

…but also, y'all couldn't even handle Catra like come on

"we need more traumatized characters/characters with ptsd and/or who are abuse victims portrayed realistically with symptoms that Arent cute and soft and pretty!" you guys couldnt even handle lapis lazuli

[majokko120]

Nothing on Social Media is Real, Unless Proven Otherwise

In the sea of photographs, videos, drawings, digital works, accounts, personas, and AI content of things presented as fictional and things presented as real, all blend to present a crowd-sourced timeline of fiction.

All who enter these surreal waters blurry their existence, caught between reality and illusion. The contextual truth revealed only to those on land by those on land, requiring both to exit the water.

Exegesis

The postulate "Nothing on Social Media is Real, Unless Proven Otherwise" suggests a fundamental skepticism about social media experiences. This skepticism stems from the inherent difficulty to verify such experiences using our given ways of knowing.

In this digital sea, a mixture of real and fictional content, fiction and reality therefore become one. Reality IS fiction, and fiction IS reality.

The statement asserts that discernment requires both the observer (user) and the observed (users, content) to step out of the digital environment, as those "on land" do not discern and know what dwells in the "water" by mere virtue of having exited the water.

Addendum

The woman posting herself online in cosplay may be a real human being of flesh, bone, and spirit, with a real physical presence and identity, but from the experienced perspective of the User she may as well not be. In the water, her existence has been reduced to something perceivable, but unknowable.

[transmutationisms]

genq what are the actual reasons that plagiarism is bad apart from profit and prestige?

so there are two main angles i usually think of here, which ultimately converge into some related issues in public discourse and knowledge production.

firstly, plagiarism should not just be understood as a violation one individual perpetuates against another; it has a larger role in processes of epistemological violence and suppression of certain people's arguments, ideas, and labour. consider the following three examples of plagiarism that is not at all counter to current structures of knowledge production, but rather undergirds them:

in colonial expeditions and encounters from roughly the 14th century onward, a repeated and common practice among european explorer-naturalists was to rely on indigenous people's knowledge of botany, geography, natural history, and so forth, but to then go on to publish this knowledge in their own native tongues (meaning most of the indigenous people they had learned from could not access, read, or respond to such publications), with little, vague, or no attribution to their correspondents, guides, hosts, &c. (many many examples; allison bigelow's 'mining language' discusses this in 16th and 17th century american mining, with a linguistic analysis foregrounded)

throughout the renaissance and early modern period, in contexts where european women were generally not welcome to seek university education, it was nonetheless common practice for men of science to rely on their wives, sisters, and other family members not just to keep house, but also to contribute to their scientific work as research assistants, translators, fund-raisers, &c. attribution practices varied but it is very commonly the case that when (if ever) historians revisit the biographies of famous men of science, they discover women around these men who were actively contributing to their intellectual work, to an extent previously unknown or downplayed (off the top of my head, marie-anne lavoisier; emma darwin; caroline herschel; rosalie lamarck; mileva marić-einstein...)

it is standard practice today for university professors to run labs where their research assistants are grad students and postdocs; to rely on grad students, undergrads, and postdocs to contribute to book projects and papers; and so forth. again, attribution varies, but generally speaking the credit for academic work goes to the faculty member at the head of the project, maybe with a few research assistants credited secondarily, and the rest of the lab / department / project uncredited or vaguely thanked in the acknowledgments.

in all of these cases, you can see how plagiarism is perpetuated by pre-existing inequities and structures of exploitation, and in turn helps perpetuate those structures by continuing to discursively erase the existence of people made socially marginal in the process of knowledge production. so, what's at stake here is more than just the specific individuals whose work has been presented as someone else's discovery (though of course this is unjust already!); it's also the structural factors that make academic and intellectual discourse an élite, exclusive activity that most people are barred from participating in. a critique of plagiarism therefore needs to move beyond the idea that a number of wronged individuals ought to be credited for their ideas (though again, they should be) and instead turn to the structures that create positions of epistemological authority under the aegis of capitalist entities: universities, legacy as well as new media outlets, and so forth. the issue here is the positions of prestige themselves, regardless of who holds them; they are, definitionally, not instruments of justice or open discourse.

secondly, there's the effect plagiarism has on public discourse and the dissemination of knowledge. this is an issue because plagiarism by definition obscures the circulation and origin of ideas, as well as a full understanding of the labour process that produces knowledge. you can see in the above examples how the attribution of other people's ideas as your own works to turn you into a mythologised sort of lone genius figure, whose role is now to spread your brilliance unidirectionally to the masses. as a result, the vast majority of people are now doubly shut out of any public discourse or debate, except as passive recipients of articles, posts, &c. you can't trace claims easily, you don't see the vast number of people who actually contribute to any given idea, and this all works to protect the class and professional interests of the select few who do manage to attain élite intellectual status, by reinforcing and widening the created gap between expert and layperson (a distinction that, again, tracks heavily along lines of race, gender, and so forth).

so you can see how these two issues really are part of one and the same structural problem, which is knowledge production as a tool of power, and one that both follows from and reinforces existing class hierarchies. in truth, knowledge is usually a collaborative affair (who among us has ever had a truly original idea...) and attributions should be a way of both acknowledging our debts to other people, and creating transparency in our efforts to stake claims and develop ideas. but, as long as there are benefits, both economic and social, to be gained from presenting yourself as an originator of knowledge, people will continue to be incentivised to do this. plagiarism is not an exception or an aberration; it's at best a very predictable outcome of the operating logics of this 'knowledge economy', and at worst—as in the examples above—a normal part of how expert knowledge is produced, and its value protected, in a system that is by design inequitable and exclusive.

[lesb0]

a lot of tumblrs indoctrinated into microcult groupthink factions like liberal vs left, trans vs terfs, hipster vs fandom, and other bs are all so desperate to be involved with epistemological bubbles because they otherwise have no access to knowledge or any actual social experiences, like if they ever stepped out of line with their cult frameworks they would be completely cut off immediately and have absolutely no one to speak to. with no friends, family, career, networks, or even any real social media tumblr IS their whole "life" so having original thoughts without adhering to the group consensus is something "life" threatening, etc

[xxxpu55yslay3rxxx]

So in other words, tumblr architecture enforces this shit lmao. This just verifies my crackpot theory that Tumblr rots your brain unless you are self aware about it.

Also I'd like to add, tumblr's commenting system sucks! Character limit that they don't tell you about, every single time you want to reply to anybody you have to tag them, making that shit look messy. Also for the fact that it just shows comments out of order sometimes. If ordered by latest first, you'll see recent comments on top sometimes even if you shouldn't.

Fuck it, let me be unhinged on the last line:

Tumblr ontologically fucking sucks!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Google+ was better!!!!!!!!!! the less this site acts like tumblr and more like good social media, the better!!!!!!!!

i think tumblr structurally encourages pissing on the poor

epistemic confidence: medium. (i always wanted to say that). this is amateur sociology and so should be taken with quite a bit of salt. this is absolutely a just-so story.

i think part of the reason tumblr and other similar social media websites have such a problem with misinterpretation is that conversational repair works differently than other forms of communication.

if you're talking in a group of people (over voice or over 'synchronous' communications like irc/discord that encourage short messages and paying attention) and someone responds in a way that indicates they misinterpreted you, you can interrupt them. and importantly, everyone else in the conversation hears you interrupting them. on a traditional forum with linear posts, you can't interrupt them, but anyone that reads all the posts (which, granted, isn't everyone) will eventually see your clarifying reply.

but on tumblr, if you make a post, X reblogs it with a misinterpretation, and you reply/reblog correcting X's interpretation, you have no way of notifying everyone that saw it from X; people generally don't go back and reread the notes on old posts, unlike forums where you'd typically read the threads you participate in. so the misinterpretation spreads.

and of course there's the whole 'screenshot this post to make fun of it' thing (which i'm not immune to, although i'm trying to do it less). it's obvious that screenshotting part of a post makes it even easier to misinterpret it, and i suspect that at this point for some people the mere presence of the "underwater" filter is enough to prime a "this is a bad opinion, i should disagree with it" reflex! and you can't go "hang on, that's not what i meant".

anyway. don't take this as like an iron law of social media or a thing that is definitely 100% true. but it's something i've been thinking about.

[so-true-overdue]

Ah, the delicate art of deception, Russia’s enduring magnum opus. In a world awash with superficial ephemera and algorithm-driven hysteria, it has emerged as a master puppeteer, manipulating the strings of disinformation to sow discord in the vulnerable Western psyche. The battlefield of choice? Social media platforms, of course—those gloriously fertile grounds where any unverified tweet or video clip can blossom into the viral infection of modern civilization.

Through meticulously crafted disinformation campaigns, Russia has weaponized truth, distorting it beyond recognition and serving it on a platter to the unsuspecting masses who consume it with insatiable gullibility. The irony is, while most of the Western world fancies itself intellectually superior, the very same platforms they created to exchange cat memes have now become tools of psychological warfare. And why wouldn’t they? What better way to dismantle a society than by first unraveling its understanding of objective reality?

Enter the antidote: verifiable journalism. Yes, that relic of an era when facts were sacrosanct and not merely alternative options on a drop-down menu. Only through rigorous, investigative journalism can we fortify the crumbling ramparts of reason against the onslaught of misinformation. In an age where everyone with a smartphone fancies themselves a beacon of truth, the numinous—a word traditionally reserved for spiritual transcendence—takes on new significance. It is through the sacred, almost mystical reverence for truth that we might reconnect with an epistemological certainty. The numinous, in this case, isn’t found in the divine but in the sheer act of seeking verifiable, unadulterated information—an endeavor that feels increasingly like an act of faith itself.

Yet, the dissonance remains palpable. Instead of scrolling through rigorously researched articles, many remain transfixed by whatever ideological poison is peddled by the latest bot, leaving the defenses of reason to rot. Because, after all, who needs journalistic integrity when you have a meme to confirm your worldview?

In this grim theater of cognitive warfare, it is not weapons but narratives that determine the victor. And unless we are willing to hold up verifiable journalism as the last bastion of intellectual integrity, the West may find itself losing more than just a few online arguments. It could lose the very essence of reality itself.

[werewolfetone]

I think that the ib programme is only good for a very very small portion of the population for a lot of reasons but I wish they made every person on earth take theory of knowledge in school. if everyone else was also forced to take an epistemology class when they were 16 and gained at least a small awareness of how literally all of human knowledge is beholden to the knower and the conditions in which the knower exists social media would be so much more bearable I mean it

[probablyasocialecologist]

The regulatory impact of GnRH [gonadotropin-releasing hormone] agents on society strongly depends on their socio-epistemic and discursive framing informed by political preconceptions. From a conservative epistemological angle these pharmaceutical agents are oftentimes understood in terms of social engineering and regulatory control. This understanding seems to predominate in conservative media and transgender exclusive radical feminist circles, as most recently the example of the unhinged tirades of the adult film actress and activist Lily Cade underscore. In conspiratory mindsets the use of puberty blockers is framed as part of the (imaginary!) “great replacement.” By demasculinizing and defeminizing western adolescents “the elites” would pave the way for a “new world order.” Yet also in less radical conservative imaginations GnRH agents evoke visions of social control and regulation, as their framing as a remedy for the deviant behavior of sexual predators shows. The cognitive dissonance between the framing of both uses as “dangerous” and “desirable” is significant for the distribution of an individual’s imagined worth in society. The diversity affirming use of GnRH agents stands in stark contrast to this notion. These ideas are not about controlling people’s bodies but about enabling individual agency, especially over gender-specific roles in society. The possibility of using a simple pharmaceutical agent to give young people who want to transition control over their own bodies fundamentally contradicts the social regulatory narrative. This leads to incommensurability and reframing of the use of puberty blockers in the conservative social-technical paradigm, as exemplified by conservative alarmist ideas. The simple act of self-efficacy of a young person is thus elevated to a fundamental affront.

22 December 2021

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Andrew Doyle

Published: Apr 18, 2024

“Why do you think the giraffe has a long neck?” says the naturalist Philip Henry Gosse to his son Edmund while he tucks him up into bed. “Does it have a long neck so that it can eat the leaves at the top of the tree? Or does it eat the leaves at the top of the tree because it has a long neck?”

“Does it matter?” says Edmund.

“A great deal, my son.”

This exchange is taken from Dennis Potter’s wonderful television play Where Adam Stood (1976), a loose adaptation of Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son (1907). Gosse’s book must rank among the very best of autobiographies. It is his account of being raised by his father Philip, one of Darwin’s close contemporaries, a man whose faith in the Bible was so fervent that the revelations of natural selection almost destroyed him.

The question about the giraffes is Potter’s invention, but it adroitly captures the profound inner struggle of this scientist who had devoted his life to a belief-system that was suddenly falling apart. It wasn’t just a matter of changing his mind as new evidence emerged, because the proposition that the earth’s age could be numbered in the billions rather than the thousands was not something that his faith could accommodate. The stumbling block was the Bible, a point that Edmund is quick to acknowledge in his book:

“My Father’s attitude towards the theory of natural selection was critical in his career, and oddly enough, it exercised an immense influence on my own experience as a child. Let it be admitted at once, mournful as the admission is, that every instinct in his intelligence went out at first to greet the new light. It had hardly done so, when a recollection of the opening chapter of Genesis checked it at the outset. He consulted with Carpenter, a great investigator, but one who was fully as incapable as himself of remodelling his ideas with regard to the old, accepted hypotheses. They both determined, on various grounds, to have nothing to do with the terrible theory, but to hold steadily to the law of the fixity of species.”

Philip Gosse had an instinct for scientific enquiry, but the new discoveries simply could not be reconciled with his holy text. His whole being was invested in the Biblical truth, and to cast that in doubt would be to undermine the crux of his being. To admit that he might have been wrong, in this particular instance, would be a form of spiritual death.

Both Gosse’s memoir and Potter’s dramatisation grapple with what Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay (in their book How to Have Impossible Conversations) call an “identity quake”, the “emotional reaction that follows from having one’s core values disrupted”. Their point is that when arguing with those who see the world in an entirely different way, we must be sensitive to the ways in which certain ideas constitute an aspect of our sense of self. In such circumstances, to dispense with a cherished viewpoint can be as traumatic as losing a limb.

The concept of identity quakes helps us to understand the extreme political tribalism of our times. It isn’t simply that the left disagrees with the right, but that to be “left-wing” has become integral to self-conceptualisation. How often have we seen “#FBPE” or “anti-Tory” in social media bios? These aren’t simply political affiliations; they are defining aspects of these people’s lives. This is also why so many online disputes seem to be untethered from reason; many are following a set of rules established by their “side”, not thinking for themselves. When it comes to fealty to the cause, truth becomes irrelevant. We are no longer dealing with disputants in an argument, but individuals who occupy entirely different epistemological frameworks.

Since the publication of the Cass Review, we have seen countless examples of this kind of phenomena. Even faced with the evidence that “gender-affirming” care is unsafe for children, those whose identity has been cultivated in the gender wars will find it almost impossible to accept the truth. Trans rights activists have insisted that “gender identity” is a reality, and their “allies” have been the most strident of all on this point. As an essentially supernatural belief, it should come as no surprise that it has been insisted on with such vigour, and that those who have attempted to challenge this view have been bullied and demonised as heretics.

Consider the reaction from Novara Media, a left-wing independent media company, which once published some tips on how to deceive a doctor into prescribing cross-sex hormones. Novara has claimed that “within hours of publication” the Cass Review had been “torn to shreds”. Like all ideologues, they are invested in a creed, and it just so happens that the conviction that “gender identity” is innate and fixed (and simultaneously infinitely fluid) has become a firm dogma of the identity-obsessed intersectional cult.

Identity quakes will be all the more seismic within a movement whose members have elevated “identity” itself to hallowed status. When tax expert Maya Forstater sued her former employers for discrimination due to her gender-critical beliefs in 2019, one of the company’s representatives, Luke Easley, made a revealing declaration during the hearing. “Identity is reality,” he said, “without identity there’s just a corpse”.

This sentiment encapsulates the kind of magical thinking that lies at the core of the creed. So while it becomes increasingly obvious that gender identity ideology is a reactionary force that represents a direct threat to the rights of women and gay people, there will be many who simply will not be able to admit it. In Easley’s terms, if their entire identity is based on a lie, only “a corpse” remains. From this perspective, to abandon one’s worldview is tantamount to suicide.

This determination to hold fast to one’s views, even when the evidence mounts up against them, is known as “belief perseverance”. It is a natural form of psychological self-defence. After all, there is a lot at stake for those who have supported and enabled the Tavistock Clinic and groups like Mermaids and Stonewall. Many of the cheerleaders have encouraged the transitioning of children, sometimes their own. What we have known for years has now been confirmed: many of these young people will have been autistic, or will have simply grown up to be gay. For people to admit that they supported the sterilisation of some of the most vulnerable in society would be to face a terrible reality.

This idea was summarised in parliament on Monday by Victoria Atkins, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. Addressing Labour MP Wes Streeting, she said:

“I welcome all those who have changed their minds about this critical issue. In order to move forward and get on with the vital work that Dr Cass recommends, we need more people to face up to the truth, no matter how uncomfortable that makes them feel. I hope the honourable gentleman has the humility to understand that the ideology that he and his colleagues espoused was part of the problem. He talked about the culture and the toxicity of the debate. Does he understand the hurt that he caused to people when he told them to ‘just get over it’? Does he know that when he and his friends on the left spent the last decade crying ‘culture wars’ when legitimate concerns were raised created an atmosphere of intimidation, with the impact on the workforce that he rightly described?”

It remains to be seen whether those politicians who failed to grapple with the implications of gender identity ideology, and who mindlessly accepted the misleading rhetoric of Stonewall and its allies, will have the humility to admit that they were wrong. Many culpable celebrities have been choosing to remain silent in recent days, while others have opted for outright denial. On the question of puberty blockers and their harm to children, television presenter Kirstie Allsop has made the remarkable claim that “it is, and always has been possible to debate these things and those saying there was no debate are wrong”. The concept of “no debate” was official Stonewall policy for many years, and has been a mantra for many within the trans activist movement. To suggest that there have been no attempts to stifle discussion on this subject can only be ignorance, mendacity or a remarkably acute form of amnesia.

Of course, the stakes could hardly be higher. We are dealing with complacency and ideological capture that had resulted in the sterilisation and castration of healthy young people. It is, without a doubt, one of the biggest medical scandals of our time. It is entirely understandable that those who have supported such terrible actions would enter a state of denial. And so we must also be sensitive to those who are now strong enough to admit that they were mistaken.

But we also need to prepare ourselves for the inevitable doubling down. There are those whose psyche cannot withstand the kind of identity quake that Philip Henry Gosse once suffered. His solution was to write a book explaining why God had left evidence of natural selection. It was called Omphalos (1857) – the Greek word for “navel” – and his thesis was that since Adam had no mother, his navel was merely an addition to generate the illusion of past that did not exist. The fossils that were being discovered in the ground were therefore no different than the rings in the first trees in the Garden of Eden. They weren’t evidence of age, but rather part of God’s poetical vision.

Some of the revisionism and excuses from gender ideologues are likely to be even more elaborate. They have invested too much in their fantasies to give up without a fight.

==

As gender identity ideology falls apart, we need to pay attention to who is working to fix the mistakes they made, who is doubling down, and who is remaining silent.

[tanadrin]

https://www.tumblr.com/tanadrin/754562150575505408/i-get-your-point-about-scorn-rage-and?source=share

It's not an emotive expression of anxiety, it's recognition that if you approach American politics with cynicism, you usually end up right. The cynics said Chevron was gonna get overturned, it got overturned. The cynics said the debate would hurt more than it helped, it did. We're in a tailspin, and nothing is stopping it.

The best thing I can do on election day is cast my ballot, show up in a bar, get blackout drunk, watch Trump get elected, and then throw myself off a fucking bridge.

Man, this is why I hate getting into these arguments. This is not a debate about the epistemological merits of pessimism. This is somebody using my ask box to vent their suicidal ideation, in the hope I can somehow fix it; and if I can’t find just the right words to say, they at least get the feeble dopamine hit of feeling right, even if they also are miserable.

Look. This is not a conversation about rational forecasting of the future. You said “we will all be dead in five years.” I said, “wow, that’s a crazy thing to say.” You said, “what I mean is I will kill myself if Trump wins.” The only causal through line here is despair. And, like, politics is important and reflects real stakes and real lives—but it is not the only important thing in the world.

You strike me as the sort of person who doomscrolls Twitter a lot, who is deeply invested in politics but doesn’t have much personal or emotional fulfillment in other areas of your life, and who is swayed by people who portray pessimism as smart and cool and optimism as naive and pathetic.

(Folks, you absolutely have to make meaning in your life outside of social media. Sorry, but it’s true. You need hobbies. You need to socialize in person. You need to go out sometimes, and work up a sweat sometimes, and stare at vistas that are not the four walls of your room and your internet browser.)

You, anon, probably need a therapist and/or a good SSRI combo, since being very depressed may make it difficult to start to do other things that will improve your mood and bring other sources of meaning to your life. But I recommend trying anyway.

I will delete further asks on this theme. Getting into one of those looping conversations where a depressed person tries to convince you their depressive spiral is an objectively correct reaction to the world around them, while you try to comfort them and suggest getting treatment for depression obliquely enough that they heed your advice is tough enough when it’s someone close to you; but it’s also a waste of my time and yours.

You have a mood disorder that affects your cognition. You cannot perceive it, because, well, you have a mood disorder that affects your cognition. It is treatable, but it will require time. I recommend spending much less time on social media while you pursue treatment, since social media can greatly exacerbate certain mood disorders.

[omegaphilosophia]

The Impact of Film and Video on Society

Film and video have profoundly impacted society in various ways, shaping culture, politics, social behavior, and individual identity. Here are some key effects:

1. Cultural Influence:

Storytelling and Shared Narratives: Films and videos serve as powerful storytelling tools that create shared cultural narratives. They convey societal values, norms, and ideals, influencing how people perceive the world and their place within it.

Globalization of Culture: The global distribution of films and videos has facilitated the spread of cultural ideas across borders, promoting cultural exchange but also raising concerns about cultural homogenization and the dominance of certain cultures over others.

2. Social and Political Impact:

Awareness and Advocacy: Films and documentaries have been instrumental in raising awareness about social and political issues, from civil rights movements to environmentalism. They can mobilize public opinion and inspire activism.

Propaganda and Persuasion: Throughout history, films have also been used as tools of propaganda, shaping public opinion and reinforcing political ideologies, particularly during times of war or political unrest.

3. Behavior and Social Norms:

Shaping Social Norms: Film and video often depict societal norms, behaviors, and expectations, influencing how individuals perceive gender roles, relationships, and other social constructs. This can reinforce stereotypes or challenge them, depending on the content.

Consumer Behavior: Advertising through video content has a significant impact on consumer behavior, influencing buying decisions and popularizing trends.

4. Identity and Representation:

Representation of Diversity: Film and video provide platforms for representing diverse identities, including different races, genders, sexual orientations, and cultures. Positive representation can foster inclusivity and self-acceptance, while negative or stereotypical portrayals can perpetuate prejudice.

Identity Formation: Individuals often see themselves reflected in film and video, influencing their identity formation and how they relate to others in society. This is particularly impactful for marginalized communities seeking representation.

5. Education and Information:

Educational Content: Films and videos are widely used as educational tools, providing accessible and engaging ways to learn about history, science, and other subjects. Visual storytelling can enhance understanding and retention of information.

Misinformation: On the downside, the spread of video content also facilitates the dissemination of misinformation, especially in the digital age, where videos can go viral without verification.

6. Technological and Artistic Innovation:

Artistic Expression: Film and video have expanded the possibilities for artistic expression, combining visual, auditory, and narrative elements to create new forms of art. This has led to the development of various film genres, styles, and techniques.

Technological Advancements: The evolution of film and video technology has driven innovation in both the arts and other fields, from CGI in movies to virtual reality experiences that blur the line between fiction and reality.

7. Social Connectivity and Communication:

Social Media and Video Content: The rise of platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram has democratized video production, allowing individuals to create and share content widely. This has revolutionized how people communicate, share information, and build communities online.

Impact on Attention Span: The proliferation of short-form video content, particularly on social media, has raised concerns about its impact on attention spans and the quality of discourse.

8. Economic Impact:

Entertainment Industry: The film and video industry is a significant economic driver, creating jobs and generating revenue globally. It also influences tourism, fashion, and other industries.

Piracy and Intellectual Property: The digital distribution of films and videos has also led to challenges with piracy, affecting the economic model of the entertainment industry.

9. Psychological and Emotional Impact:

Emotional Engagement: Films and videos have the power to evoke strong emotional responses, from joy and laughter to fear and sadness. This emotional engagement can have therapeutic effects or, conversely, contribute to emotional desensitization.

Escapism and Coping Mechanism: For many, watching films or videos serves as a form of escapism, providing a temporary reprieve from the stresses of everyday life and offering a means of coping with personal challenges.

10. Ethical and Moral Reflection:

Moral Dilemmas: Films often explore complex moral dilemmas, prompting viewers to reflect on their values and beliefs. This can lead to greater empathy and ethical consideration in real-life situations.

Impact on Violence and Behavior: The portrayal of violence in films and videos has sparked debates about its potential influence on behavior, particularly among young audiences, leading to discussions about censorship and responsible media consumption.

Film and video have transformed society by shaping culture, influencing behavior, driving technological innovation, and providing new ways to communicate and express ideas. While they offer significant benefits in education, entertainment, and social awareness, they also pose challenges related to representation, misinformation, and ethical considerations. As these mediums continue to evolve, their impact on society will likely grow, further intertwining with our daily lives and collective consciousness.

[dailyanarchistposts]

When Elon Musk took over Twitter and the platform began to tank, the stock value plummeted, and people were leaving in droves, many of us thought he was just an arrogant doofus, a parasitic man-child who became a billionaire by throwing around free money, more recently billions in government subsidies but originally, as a kid, his massive inheritance from South African diamond mines. And he is all those things, but there is also something more going on here.

The Twitter takeover, in fact, possesses an opaque but important similarity with—of all things—the Chinese government’s COVID policy. If we assume that Musk’s many fumbles with one of the world’s largest social media platforms is nothing but a blunder, nothing but stupidity, then we miss out on an illuminating question. Which, it turns out, is the same question we miss when we assume the Chinese government’s zero tolerance COVID policy is a mere example of totalitarian inclinations or a different public health culture (both of which are explanations infused with racist stereotypes).

So what on Earth connects Elon Musk to China’s COVID policy? For one thing, one of Musk’s other companies, Tesla, became the first foreign company to wholly own a car factory in China when they opened an assembly plant in Shanghai in 2019. The Shanghai Gigafactory is one of Tesla’s largest, though it ran into problems when the government temporarily closed it down in 2020, and again in March 2022, to enforce a COVID quarantine. As the threat of new quarantines pops up, Musk might consider sending new investments to countries with weaker regulations like India. Apple, for example, is increasingly relying on India over China for iPhone production, meaning China’s COVID policy is costing them foreign direct investment.

There’s the similarity. A government policy causing a loss in revenue. A new corporate policy causing a plummet in stock value. Are we to judge both of these policies failures, or at the least, ineffective, because they lost money?

And that gets us to our central question: do companies and governments in this capitalist world system exist to make money? Is money, capital accumulation, the fundamental driving force of our world?

If it is, then both the turbulence Elon Musk has caused at Twitter and the stagnation the Chinese government has inflicted on its own economy due to its zero tolerance COVID policies have to be viewed as blunders, as they have unarguably caused a loss of economic value. However, in both cases, we might at least entertain the possibility that such an argument is reductionist if it hides other factors and outcomes that cannot be so easily quantified.

And quantification is an angle we need to explore to be able to answer this question. Even though the vagaries of international finance make it an obscure field, economic loss is easy to measure relative to qualitative forms of evaluation. Did Twitter lose value? Did the growth rate of the Chinese economy contract? Since both of these questions can be reduced to a number and real numbers are arranged along a single dimension, meaning we can always say whether one number is more or less than another number, then yes, Twitter lost value, and yes, the Chinese economy began to grow at a slower rate. So if it’s all about money, both of these policies were mistakes.

Before considering the case closed, should we be thinking about any kinds of qualitative as opposed to quantitative analysis that might illuminate the topic? After all, the knowledge systems of all the dominant institutions of our society are heavily biased in favor of quantitative and objective frameworks of thought; in fact this epistemology is central to the rationalism of the modern state and of capitalism itself, given that they allow for reproducibility and thus industrialism as both an economic and a political or war-making mode, and they allow ethical and spiritual frameworks to be subsumed into the construction of society itself, therefore making them invisible and immune to being questioned. If you want me to explain this idea more, let me know and I’ll devote some time to it in the future, but for now, let’s get back to Twitter.

What did Musk accomplish at Twitter, aside from losing unimaginably vast sums of money and showing the entire world that he’s not as intelligent as he thinks he is? He has taken a huge step to create a more right-wing media environment in what might become the biggest change to the landscape since the emergence of Fox News. True, Twitter’s algorithms always favored the specific content and also the controversy-seeking, baiting tactics of the Right. It is also true that conversation on Twitter was more often than not superficial and demeaning. However, we should not deny that anarchists and other anticapitalists saw Twitter as an important space for organizing and outreach. I had never been on social media my entire life, until finally around the end of 2019, when other anarchists convinced me that it did not make sense for me to spend so much time writing if I was going to avoid the platforms where writing and political analysis were actually being distributed in the current day.

And there are other corners of Twitter where emotional supportiveness, care, and mutual aid are actually the norm, spaces important in many people’s lives for building safety and opportunities for healing and connection, in rejection of the ableist, trans- and homophobic, racist culture that predominates in public space.

So yes, Twitter is a hellsite, but if we so quickly forget about some of the things that brought us there, we risk missing the relevance of this moment. Musk’s takeover of Twitter has enabled a fierce campaign of censorship against anarchist and other anticapitalist accounts, frequently executed by Musk himself, to such an extent that we should seriously consider that this was one of his primary motivations, more than making money. We already know that restoring Trump’s account was a motivator for him.

Meanwhile, the centrist media has given massive coverage to the Right’s “free speech” anti-censorship alibi. They continue to portray Musk as an anti-censorship figure, restoring far-Right accounts that had been banned, and they refuse to mention the accounts that Musk has been banning.

What about the Chinese government’s zero-tolerance COVID policy? Obviously, shutting everything down in a neighborhood, a city, or an entire region as soon as a rise in COVID cases is detected is going to be disruptive to the economy, as when when authorities closed down Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory and so many other thousands of factories. For a while now, Chinese planners and economists internationally have figures detailing how the zero-tolerance and other regulatory policies are slowing the economy and causing unemployment to skyrocket.

It’s important to mention that GDP growth is not just a metric imposed by Western observers. The Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping has made GDP growth targets a central part of their ruling strategy and their conceptualization of development. And yet, midway through the year, when it became clear they would not even meet their already reduced target of 5.5% growth, they chose to prioritize their restrictive no COVID policies.

Most countries in the world chose to allow a massive number of deaths in exchange for better economic growth. In the US, that’s over 1 million deaths, a figure we don’t see the media mention very often. However, the Chinese government cannot accurately be accused of humanitarianism, given that their solutions have included locking workers into their factories. In fact, their zero-tolerance COVID policy bears a striking similarity to Mao’s Four Pests Campaign, which sought to drive animals like flies and sparrows to extinction as a part of the government’s ambitious agricultural program. The purpose is less to save lives and more to eliminate external, natural forces capable of disrupting a rational, quantitative planning process.

A couple notes here, for accuracy. Mao is frequently lambasted for trying to eliminate sparrows, and the disastrous ecological consequences that policy had. At the same time (late ‘50s) and for significantly longer, the US government was trying to exterminate the wolves. Also, Western hacks and mainstream media frequently refer to socialist states as “planned economies” and NATO states as “free market economies.” Though there are significant differences in the strategies of state intervention in the economy, these labels are bogus since all modern states exist on the same continuum. The US government, from the beginning but even more so since FDR, engages in substantive economic planning, deciding which sectors will get the most capital, deciding interest rates, setting targets for inflation; and the Chinese government allows and encourages a massive private sector that is more responsive to market forces.

The reason all states engage in planning, and a more accurate framework for understanding the nature of that planning, is social control.

What is social control? The Marxist I like the most told me it is a fetishistic, meaningless category. Actually, it’s a necessary concept for explaining some glaring holes in Marxism itself and in any framework that sees capital accumulation as the be-all and end-all for understanding our society.

Musk’s actions make sense, even though they lost him $9 billion dollars, because like any capitalist he is worried about fundamental questions of social control that allow him to be a capitalist in the first place. The Chinese government’s actions make sense because developing techniques that allow a state to neutralize and surpass epidemics would greatly increase that state’s planning powers, and even if they fail they are testing and amplifying their arsenal of social control techniques, and social control is the fundamental concern of any state and thus the fundamental concern of capitalism, being an economic system entirely dependent on state power.

In this context it is worth noting that the Chinese government decided to relax their COVID policy not in early July, when they were forced to choose that policy over their economic growth targets, but at the end of November, when mass protests bordering on insurrection against the policy broke out. The policy got in the way of economic accumulation: they stuck to it. The policy got in the way of social control: they abandoned it.

Academically trained Marxists are going to be biased in favor of a quantitative analysis, like seeing capital accumulation as the fundamental force in our society, for the same reasons that all our dominant institutions are biased in favor of quantitative analysis. A qualitative analysis is not reproducible, and the modern state needs access to reproducible sciences.

This seems like a contradiction to claim that the state is fundamentally motivated by a qualitative science, like social control, and yet constantly in need of a quantitative science like capital accumulation. In fact, this contradiction traces a tense balance, a relation, that has come to shape the entire planet in these last centuries. The fundamental truth of the State is social control, an existential war waged by centralized power against all life. And the most effective motor the State has ever developed to fuel its war is not a winning religion, it’s not a more streamlined process for the transfer of power, it’s economic accumulation. Before capitalism, states were exponentially weaker, frequently overthrown by the societies they tried to dominate, even when state and society shared the hierarchical culture produced by patriarchy and organized religion.

Capitalism, which requires the enclosure of the commons and the alienation of all life, cannot exist without the planning and war-making powers of the State. And once capitalism emerged, created in a continuum by the Italian city-states, the Castillian-Aragonese state, and finally in its modern form by the Dutch state, it bestowed the states that adopted it with such power that henceforth it became the duty of every government on the planet to embrace capitalism, lest they be overwhelmed by those that already had. This sheds light on one of the reasons that colonialism spread in such a rapid wave, especially where there were already states that could be instrumentalized in the conquered territories. And it helps explain why socialism, by not rejecting the state, was fully absorbed by capitalism in the early 20th century, and why all Marxist-inspired states are fully capitalist, fully colonial, and every bit as imperialist as their geopolitical circumstances allow them to be.

Capital accumulation is a necessary motor for the state; it is also a favored metric for a quantitative science of power. Given that accumulation is a result of oppressive, exploitative processes and it cannot happen without the domination of society and nature, high rates of accumulation are generally a good indicator that state power is firmly ensconced, that the State is winning its war against life. Still, the fundamental question is that of social control. Many capitalists, as specialists, will lose sight of this as they become obsessed with their numbers game, but in the end it’s just a game, a highly useful game, and when push comes to shove, questions of social war will always be more important for the institutions of power. The trick for them is to make sure that seeking capital accumulation and seeking social control always go hand in hand, rather than entering into contradiction.

As for anticapitalist movements, we lose sight of the social war at our own risk. The reasons for this are multiple. Marxism’s predictive power regarding the development of the revolution is nil, displaying a profound lack of understanding of what revolution actually means. Attempts to combine materialist with geopolitical analysis, as with Giovanni Arrighi’s development of world systems theory (on the whole an illuminating theoretical framework) also demonstrate their inaccuracy and disconnection from living history wherever they focus too heavily on quantitative questions of capital accumulation, a weakness explored in Alex Gorrion’s “Anarchy in World Systems.” These are not just obscure questions relating to debates from past centuries, given how academic, materialist-oriented journals and discussion groups continue to falsify the history of revolutionary struggle as we live it, claiming, for example, that the major uprisings of the past two decades have occurred as a result of the crisis of accumulation, when in fact the uprisings preceded the manifestation of that crisis and have occurred in countries experiencing polar opposite moments in the kinds of crises capitalism constantly produces.

(I shouldn’t have to provide this rebuttal, but alas, experience tells me I do: it is intellectually dishonest and a waste of everyone’s time to start off by claiming that rebellion is “produced” by a specific quantitative crisis in accumulation, to then be shown that in fact rebellions are occurring in completely different economic circumstances—the crises associated with growth, the crises associated with recession, the crises associated with inflation—and then to double back around and claim that one’s original argument was that crisis produces rebellion. Given that capitalism is a constant string of crises, this is a meaningless statement with nothing predictive or scientific about it, and it sets up the dishonest strawman that non-materialists believe that rebellions come out of thin air, in no way a response to their surroundings.)

Time and again, the first sign of crisis that materialists notice is the rebellion itself, meaning they are rarely on the front lines. Those who are more present tend to be those who decide to fight back even if objective conditions are supposedly unfavorable.

For our survival, we need to understand the ways the State is designing a constant war against us, and always has been, and always will be. For our liberation, we need to understand unquantifiable life, abundance without capital, and we need to develop an intelligence for a kind of struggle that also subverts the logic of warfare. A collective sight that can perceive the battlefield but destroy the opposing army by moving sideways, by burrowing, by climbing into the trees, by turning the battlefield back into a field, a forest, a community.

[schraubd]

Did You Hear? CUNY Branches Cancel Hillel Yom Ha'atzmaut Events

Two branches of the City University of New York system -- Kingsborough and Baruch -- have apparently canceled Israeli Independence Day events sponsored by local Hillel chapters, citing security risks. In the case of Baruch, administrators reportedly offered alternative venues to the Hillel chapter (which were declined), at Kingsborough, by contrast, the administration reportedly refused to make any arrangements to enable the event to go forward. CUNY is a public university, so this raises the usual First Amendment problems. While every case is different, there are some clear overlaps between this case (in particular, the citation to "security" concerns) and the cancellation of pro-Palestinian speakers and events justified on similar logic (for example, at USC). This, of course, represents a golden opportunity for people to lob dueling hypocrisy charges at one another ("You were aghast when this happened at USC, but I don't hear you complaining now!" "Yeah, well you were apologizing for this when it happened at USC, but you're aghast now!"). I'm sure that will be a grand old time for everyone. I do want to make one note on the relative coverage and penetration of this story compared to other free speech debacles related to Israel and Palestine on campus. I haven't seen this story covered outside of the Jewish press. That doesn't mean it won't be later, and I'm not generally a fan of the "...but you'll never see this reported in the mainstream media!" genre of commentary. In part, that's because I think there's massive selection bias in what we claim is over- or under-covered; in part, it's because I think virtually everyone massively overestimates how many stories break through to mass public consciousness at all. In reality, I think different stories gain traction in different media domains, such that a story which might tear through one sort of social or ideological circle might make barely a ripple in another. That said, in many of the circles I reside in, there is essentially no knowledge that there are any cases of academic censorship of "pro-Israel" voices on campus at all. To be clear, I'm not saying that there are not numerous cases of academic freedom violations targeting pro-Palestinian speakers -- there are a slew of them. But the notion that this is a Palestine exception to academic freedom, rather than something which unfortunately happens in a host of other cases and contexts (including, in the right-slash-wrong environments, to pro-Israel speakers), speaks less to the reality of academic freedom and more to an epistemology of which cases get attention and which don't. There are many academics for whom the Steven Salaitas are known, while the Melissa Landas are not. In other domains and registers, there are different gaps. Ultimately, it's a variant on "they would say it about Jews, they'd say it about other groups too." The claims of injustice are not wrong, but the claims of uniqueness very often are. How many times have we heard variations on "can you imagine if there was a mob of people harassing and making racist remarks towards any other minority group -- how would universities respond to that?" (As we saw at UCLA, the answer apparently is "they'd sit back and let said mob kick the crap out of their targets"). And at the same time, we've also heard plenty of iterations of "if a university dared cancel a pro-Israel event, it'd be on the front-page of every newspaper for the next month" (so far, no headlines). So I'll all say is that, if you're of the bent that there's no meaningful suppression of pro-Israel speech in campus environments, and your informational ecosystem (other than me, I guess) didn't alert you to this cancellation at CUNY, you should consider how the former belief might be correlated with the latter lacuna. Other people might have different gaps, and they should contemplate what generates them as well. via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/SaROhQI

[luxe-pauvre]

MIT professor Judith Donath has observed that even when people appear to be talking about other things, they're often talking about themselves. Suppose I log on to Facebook and share a false - even absurd- story about how airplane contrails are endocrine-disrupting chemicals being sprayed as part of a liberal plot to lower the testosterone levels of America's youth. I may not be as interested in having you believe my claims about contrails as I am in signalling my own political affiliations. Sharing an article like this signals that I belong to a group of people who believe in conspiracy theories and distrust the "liberal agenda" in America. And if that's my aim, it doesn't matter to me whether the story is true or false. I may not have read it, I may not care if you read it, but I want you to know that I am a fellow tinfoil hatter. The signal itself becomes the point. […] Professor Donath's insight springs from a broader tradition in the field known as communication theory. We often think of communication solely as the transmission of information from sender to receiver. But this ignores a second, broader social aspect of communication, one that is revealed by its origins in the Latin verb communicate, "to make shared or common.” Communication is how we establish, reinforce, and celebrate a shared framework for thinking about the world. Think about a religious mass, or even the scripted, ordered regularity of the nightly news. Communication over social media does the same thing: It creates and structures social communities. When we send out a tweet or Facebook post or Instagram image, we are affirming our commitment to the values and beliefs of our particular online community. As the community responds, these common values are reaffirmed through likes, shares, comments, or retweets. Blindfolded and submerged in a pool, I shout "Marco!" If I do so correctly, my network of acquaintances sends back an encouraging chorus. "Polo! Polo! Polo!" Participating on social media is only secondarily about sharing new information; it is primarily about maintaining and reinforcing common bonds. The danger is that, in the process, what was once a nationwide conversation fragments beyond repair, People begin to embrace tribal epistemologies in which the truth itself has less to do with facts and empirical observation than with who is speaking and the degree to which their message aligns with their community's worldview.

Carl T. Bergstrom & Jevin D. West, Calling Bullshit: The Art of Scepticism in a Data-Driven World

[vital-information]

"Much work in queer and transgender studies is governed by an epistemological framework that, as Robyn Wiegman has argued, “calls for scholars in identity studies to offer cogent and full accounts of identity’s inherent multiplicity in ways that can exact specificity about human experience without reproducing exclusion”. This version of an intersectional critical project faces an injunction to continually bifurcate the categories of identity it takes as its objects, driving toward a horizon beyond which the spider web of subaltern identity will be fully articulated and social justice (or at least its discursive possibility) will be achieved. The attempt to glimpse the other side of this horizon can lead to the fetishization of certain kinds of bodies—the contours of which change over time—as representing an Archimedean endpoint of radical otherness. Within queer theory and politics, rapid changes in the social location of gays and lesbians have forced these contours to shift quite rapidly. As a homonormative political vision has made its way to the center of liberal politics and concomitant rights have been granted to some—generally white, moneyed, and sexually respectable—gay and lesbian subjects, the L, G, and (more ambiguously) B in the bricolage of queer identity no longer appear to pose, in and of themselves, an existential challenge to social and political norms. A queer political discourse that remains beholden to the logic of identity has thus passed the buck along to the T, asking transgender subjects to hold down the fort of queer difference. The transgender subject—and particularly the figure of the trans woman of color—has come to figure within these coordinates as “a utensil to reference at will” when figuring the outer limits of political representability (Vidal-Ortiz). As Kate Millett once wrote of Jean Genet, trans women of color are seen within this discourse as having “achieved the lowest status in the world,” and through that “perfection of opprobrium” have “acquire[d] the pride of the utterly abject, a condition which turns out to be next door to saintliness”.

All of this has led to what we might call a politics of trans sincerity, in which the gender-nonconforming subject is celebrated as transgres-sive to the extent that her nonconformity can be read as serious —that is, to the extent that she rejects camp...

This new vision of transgender evokes David Halperin’s account of a contemporary homonormative sociality in which sex and desire have switched places with culture and sensibility as tokens of admission into gay male life. Whereas once, Halperin quips, gay men hid their porn collections in the closet and framed their Broadway playbills, now they hide their play-bills in the closet and frame their porn (). Yet this state of affairs—which, in the case of both transgender (particularly trans feminine) and gay male aesthetics, pivots on the status of camp—exists in tension with one that has been more often remarked upon: the self-conscious absorption of camp aesthetics into a wide swath of mainstream media productions, from Lady Gaga to RuPaul’s Drag Race, which in turn bear a complex and varied relationship to queer audiences. In Halperin’s account, such productions testify to the survival of gay culture, however disavowed, after several generations of denial that it still exists or still matters.

I would amend this argument to claim that, though camp performance is in fact ubiquitous, camp reading practices—techniques for interpreting a performance, cross-gendered or otherwise, as camp—have been pushed back into the closet. “What Camp taste responds to is ‘instant character,’ ” Sontag writes, “understood as a state of continual incandescence—a person being one, very intense thing”. You may not be the gender you were assigned at birth, but according to the ontology of camp, you are really something. (And most likely you are—as my grandmother would say, with the emphasis on both words—really something.) Camp taste’s response to such incandescence may take on a range of affective and epistemological guises. It can appear as an intimate act of aggression, as in the drag spectator’s “read,” her knowing look at a performance that shows its seams (Butler, Bodies). But it can manifest, too, as what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls camp-recognition, in which the encounter with a tacky or overwrought object elicits a gesture of sympathetic identification from the viewer who, instead of distancing herself from the scene of aesthetic disaster, asks, “What if whoever made this was gay, too?". Either way, camp reading—forsaken or forgotten within much queer political discourse today—marks an attempt to grasp its object as a whole."

Marissa Brostoff, "Notes on Caitlyn, or Genre Trouble"